Tag: 2024election

Domestic Policy, General, Nationalist Theory, Politics

The Crisis of the American Spirit – The Rise of Identity Politics

Bob Claude |

“We have no room in any healthy American community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote, and it is contemptible demagogy to put plans into any party platform with the purpose of catching such a vote. We have no room for any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans, and nothing else. Moreover, we have as little use for people who carry religious prejudices into our politics as for those who carry prejudices of caste or nationality.”

Theodore Roosevelt, “True Americanism”, The Forum Magazine, April 1894

This is the fifth article in my series “The Crisis of the American Spirit”. Please click on the “Politics – Nationalist Theory” tab in menu above to read the previous four, filed in reverse chronological order.

When President Bill Clinton declared “The era of big government is over”, he threw the modern-day Democratic Party into one of the greatest ideological crises in it’s history. Thanks to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, it had abandoned the Jefferson-Jackson philosophy of states rights and small government in favor of Theodore Roosevelt’s call for a strong national government dedicated to effective regulation.  Now, one of its own said it had to find a new ideological anchor. It found it a new form of political division that rejected Theodore Roosevelt’s call to unity above and, instead, echoed its old platform – identity politics.  

The need to reconcile American diversity was recognized early in our nation’s history. The first major identity groups were sectional or state based.  People identified as New Yorkers or Virginians and the Constitution was crafted to recognize the validity of those identities and preserve them while trying to build a cohesive national government at the same time.  The inevitable tension between these two goals led to sectional based political clashes between West and East and eventually North and South.  Back then, the Democratic Party championed state’s rights against those who favored a strong federal government. Their approach dominated American public policy for most of the first 70 years of our history.

Meanwhile, the seeds of our current identity group politics were being sown by our failure to address the stain of black slavery.  Attempts to reconcile the moral contradiction of slavery within the state’s rights framework failed miserably.  Even the Southern slave states eventually rejected this approach and imposed their own version of a national solution for slavery in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The backlash against it led to the founding of the Republicans, which became the new party advocating a strong national government. The victory of the North in the bloody Civil War that followed enshrined the dominance of the national government. People no longer said “The United States are”. They said “ The United States is”.

Despite it’s new power, the national government was unable to prevent the re-subjugation of black Americans, mainly because it remained a federalist system dependent on at least state acquiescence to national policies.  The 1960’s civil rights movement offered a glimmer of hope for real racial socioeconomic integration. However, as I mentioned earlier in this series, the blue collar jobs that enabled the early immigrants to achieve the American Dream moved overseas and the education system was allowed to deteriorate, thus making it difficult to for blacks to compete in the new economy.

Black Americans’ isolation eventually forced them into a form of nationalism, which became their main source of identity. Meanwhile, the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of the women’s liberation, gay rights and disability rights movements. They also emphasized the importance of group identity and solidarity, each believing they were special victims suffering unique discrimination and oppression despite laws designed to prevent discrimination and integrate them into broader American society. Instead, these groups focused on their different American histories and pinned their primary loyalty to their particular group rather than their country, which they believed was an enemy.

Sadly, instead of challenging this mindset, the Republican Party of Donald Trump doubled down on it by fostering a new identity group.  The MAGA ideology claims to preserve America, but in fact teaches its adherents to think of themselves as victims and members of a white Christian subgroup who are under attack by other groups.  This kind of victimhood is fundamentally unAmerican whether it occurs on the left or right and Theodore Roosevelt would have condemned it as such.

Nevertheless, our current political class stokes these identity group divisions for their own political benefit. They do so by engaging in rhetoric that inflames a group’s grievances and feelings of victimhood without developing a sustainable solution. They then try to assemble winning coalitions by piling up monolithic voting groups like building blocks. This cynical strategy conveniently masks the fact that many of those group’s grievances stem from the same elitist exploitation and that, in the end, each group has more in common than they think.

A bridge leader like TR would have recognized the danger this kind of politics posed to American strength.  He would have reminded Americans of Lincoln’s maxim that “A house divided against itself cannot stand” and urged all groups toward tolerance of their differences.  He would have called all Americans to unify to address inequalities, while reminding blacks, gay and other minorities that their progress to this point came because they were Americans and benefited from our shared beliefs in justice and equality. 

Thankfully, voters have started to wise up to this cynical manipulation.  The overwhelming support Democrats enjoyed among blacks and working-class voters has suffered significant inroads from Republicans while higher income voters are increasingly Democratic. Despite the best efforts of the political class, Americans are starting to think for themselves and explore new, less divisive and more relevant political groupings.

Usually, such breakdowns of historic voting blocs herald a major realignment of American politics toward a more relevant ideological debate. If this new politics is to succeed, it must challenge the forces that have weakened the American community spirit and unify us to face the realistic limits of today’s multipolar world.  It starts with presenting the American people with clear and relevant choices, hopefully through a bridge leader like TR. My next series of articles will set forth why these new choices will be between the ideologies of globalism and American nationalism. 

Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy, General, Nationalist Theory, Politics

The Crisis of the American Spirit – Living with Limits

Bob Claude |

Early Americans were blessed to grow up without a real sense of limits.  After all, an entire continent beckoned before them, offering challenges that occupied the country for almost three centuries.  Those frontiers, however, were less important than the values frontier eventually enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It is too easy to forget how revolutionary the concepts of democracy and basic human rights were in a world that remained hostile to those ideas well into the nineteenth century.  Pushing this frontier forward was as exciting and dangerous as expanding the land frontier.  It involved personal and national sacrifice to tame and develop these new frontiers. The failure to address the contradiction of slavery forced the nation into a bloody civil war. Nevertheless, these frontiers created an optimistic spirit that animated American life and gave the Americans the feeling they were creating something new through the first century of the nation’s life.

The closing of the American land frontier in the 1890s initiated a serious debate about American goals and meanings.  The country was then in the middle of an Industrial Revolution creating once again a new, apparently limitless economic frontier of productive innovation. It also created a new challenge for American values frontier. The new industries absorbed immigrants fleeing the same economic and political turmoil as the original settlers but offered more stifling careers and a dangerous level of socioeconomic inequality threatening those values. Enter Theodore Roosevelt, who served as the perfect bridge to this new economic frontier. His life spanned the two worlds of Western pioneering and urban industrialization. He also never forgot that he became President because of an anarchist’s bullet and so sparked an era of progressive legislation that gave new hope for fairness for the average American in the new economy.  The America he left behind had renewed its confidence and a sense of limitless vistas as it entered the twentieth century.

American leadership in productivity and innovation led to both increasing international influence and socioeconomic strain that thankfully found a new bridge leader in TR’s cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. Economists still debate how effective the New Deal was in countering the Great Depression, but FDR’s program clearly lifted the spirits of the country.  The advent of World War II not only provided the economic improvement promised by the New Deal, but also ushered in a beguiling new frontier of international influence. The US now had the ability to pursue two of its historic frontiers simultaneously  – the expansion of American values across a global land frontier.  The fight against fascism and then communism justified the sacrifices involved, but also contained a Pandora’s box of temptations to overreach and hubris.

For almost fifty years after World War II, this Goldilocks period of unlimited American power seemed unstoppable. In fact, the economic and international influence frontiers were slowly closing behind us beginning in the 1970s.  The European and Asian economies devastated by the war retooled with more efficient innovative industrial facilities and, in many cases, better educational systems that allowed businesses and workers to move up the value chain and win better wages.   Meanwhile, the American industrial system stagnated and lost capital investment to new high tech and information companies. This seemed to revitalize the economic frontier for a time, only to find out how easy technological change was to duplicate, steal or exploit for sinister use. Similarly, the limits of our international power were illustrated in the Vietnam War, but then apparently renewed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the victory in the 1990 Gulf War. This ushered in the triumphant claims of a New World Order in which the US would lead the world to the new heaven of liberal values and economic bliss.

In truth, this was all being supported by policies that mortgaged the real future to sustain the illusion of an unlimited future.  Our political leadership defied TR’s warning and deceived people into believing that these unlimited vistas could be achieved with no real sacrifice. Tax cuts and government spending covered up the decline in incomes while overseas business investment slowly increased. As a result, the US went from being one of the 5 lowest debt-to-GDP countries in 2000 to one of the top 5 highest in only 23 years. The 9/11 attacks spurred a quixotic Global War on Terror that committed the nation to further military spending and long, poorly thought and fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The desperate futility of these policies was covered up by triumphalist rhetoric and a financialization of the economy that led to increasing inequality.  Instead of TR’s call to visionary sacrifice, the American people were encouraged to act like kids in a candy store who, when asked which piece of candy they would like, respond with “I want it all!”

So now we face the end of the era of unlimited economic and international power without the tools to bridge to the next era.  The drop in economic productivity due to our failure to invest in education and infrastructure makes it more difficult to maintain our standard of living and raise the necessary internal capital to keep up with the rest of the world.  The rise in debt is corroding the dollars’ status as a reserve currency – an important source of international power.  Meanwhile, China and the BRICS of the Global South are ushering in the new G-0 world of diverse powers that can chart their own destiny without us and create new rules of order more compatible with their own interests.

A modern bridge leader would have convinced the American people to invest in themselves through education and industries at home, avoided the weakening adventures abroad, and called us to new visionary, but achievable, frontiers at home and in our foreign policy. Why didn’t this happen?  Part of the reason is found in history, and not just one  – the subject of the next post.

Next – an awareness of different histories